The Morgan Stanley executive charged with assault, theft of services and second-degree intimidation based on race or bigotry after allegedly stabbing a cab driver in a dispute over a fare pleaded not guilty to hate crime charges today. William Bryan Jennings, who has been placed on leave from his $2 million-a-year job as co-head of fixed income and capital markets at Morgan Stanley, left Stamford Superior Court without commenting to reporters. But the Post was there to document the lines on his face, saying he was "sporting a misplaced smirk on his mug throughout this morning’s appearance."
Last week, cab driver Mohammed Ammar described the incident, claiming that an intoxicated Jennings screamed, threatened and stabbed him after he refused to pay the full $204 fare for the 43-mile trip from Manhattan to his $3.6 million home in Darien, Connecticut. "You should go back to your own f--king country...I’m gonna kill you, motherf--ker!” Ammar said Jennings screamed at him just before stabbing him with a penknife.
Jennings lawyer countered those claims, insisting that his client had been abducted by Ammar, never used racial epithets, and never stabbed him: “He was held against his will in that vehicle. The cabdriver has admitted that. We asked the police department [to file charges], no charges have been brought so far.”
Jennings told police he was so afraid of the cab driver knowing where he lived, he went on a vacation to Florida the day after the incident. “Jennings said he didn’t know what to do—he just wanted the whole thing to go away,” Darien Police Detective Chester Perkowski said in a court document. In that same document, Perkowski wrote his investigation “discredits Jennings’ statement that Ammar reached into the back of the cab while he was driving.”
